We All Knew We Were Safe by Sue Goncarovs

We all Knew We Were Safe.

In the 1990's, our County launched a School Resource Officer program at our suburban middle school -- what we now call "highly diverse " situated the center of a working class neighborhood. Our task was to create a nurturing educational environment free of violence. While a recent Washington Post article touches the historical narrative about why our communities need to defund the police, few people actually know what that means.

In order to reclaim our school communities we need to keep some things safe. Personal experience about our Community School Resource officer needs to be injected into the discussion.

Our middle school was fed by 7 elementary schools with boundaries that included a variety of neighborhoods...each faced the challenges many schools today now face with respect to ethnic and cultural diversity. Central Office Administrative thinking was to contain the "demographic."

Teachers thought differently. And the reason we did is because we saw the effect instability, poverty and war had first hand. Many had been forcibly extricated from places with no safety or education for children and so many had been either witness to or the recipients of violence.

Ninety-eight percent had of our student body couldn't read or write in their native language. Their parents stood near the the local convenience stores and waited for pick up construction labor work.

So, we were the first in our County as far as we knew to have a School Resource Officer. We were grateful for Terri. She seemed to fit perfectly into our overcrowded, understaffed, noisy corner of chaos called a middle school. Because her "beat" was the most impoverished and crowded neighborhoods in which our kids lived, she got to know our kids by name. Terri met them while walking through our hallways, and they rushed to greet her, hug her, or gave her a high sign and smile. When they did, many felt safe perhaps for the first time in their young lives. Terri knew it was a daily struggle for kids this age to learn to read do their homework and stay away from gangs. She came into their classrooms first greeting teachers, sometimes to just sit and listen and watch out for a kid who may have had problems the night before. She was always discreet.

A dear middle school teacher/blogger friend of mine recently wrote about how interaction with our students was one of the key elements to being a good teacher, which is now evidenced by the absence of it all during the COVID pandemic. He doesn't know our Terri, but he knows of her and wishes he had someone like her in his middle school.

You see Terri provided that interactive, key element which may get forgotten in our haste to remove true assets from our schools. The School Resource Officer should never be a threat to students or teachers. Terri knew it was her job to keep us all safe. She took the time to make sure kids knew what was appropriate behavior and why. And because she knew where kids came from, knew that their learning issues often caused them to act out, Terri accepted that as the backbone of her job...which was first and foremost, to understand and work compassionately with the entire middle school community.

There were plenty of bad guys trying to prey on our community and our kids, from the real estate gentrifiers who gouged rent from their parents to gang bangers whose recruitment tactics were learned on TV shows like Law and Order.

You see Terri knew the bad guys by name, too.

I'll never forget how, while she was waiting for backup handcuffing a "bad guy" in the neighborhood, a parent came up to her and asked to talk to her about her child's grades. I also remember the donations for eyeglasses, lunch money and party dresses and how our kids felt safer because Terri's panda parked outside the many nights of the many school dances. To everyone in our school community, Terri represented the trust we should be giving our police because she was well trained to do her job.

A huge part of that training was TRUST. That's what we should be striving for...professional people who KNOW their job. Terri trained so many and it was never about gratuitous violence. We all wanted a safe, educational environment.

What "defunding" should include is interaction and immersion with the community at its most basic and humane levels, not removing what works only to replace it with what probably won't.

We don't need to arm our teachers and we don't need to militarize our police. What we need is for our Terri -- and people like her --- to work with us again, teach us what she knows and demonstrate the respect for the job she loved.

We're all retired now, but we don't look back with a rose colored view.

Nope... we are looking ahead and hoping that social justice will be about fairness, generosity of spirit, tolerance, calm and respect.

Thank you, Terri.